A Fashionable Life: Max & Lubov Azria

The designers and their handsome brood of six children take us inside their Los Angeles home. Click here to see pictures of the expansive Azria house.

Shabbat dinner is extremely important to Max and Lubov Azria, the husband-and-wife team behind the labels BCBG and Max Azria and the relaunched Hervé Léger. In fact, this meal is so important to Max and Lubov, as well as their six children, that the Azrias built a new 60-room manse in L.A.'s Holmby Hills just to host the weekly festivities. But don't worry. They live there too.

"Sometimes there's only five people, sometimes a hundred," says Lubov of the tradition, which Max began 25 years ago, when he first moved to Los Angeles from Paris. (He and Lubov met when he hired her as his design assistant at his company in 1991. On their first date, he asked her to marry him. She declined.) "Max enjoys people so much. He says if they know your house is welcoming, then they will come. The whole point is for people to meet people." Among the regulars are Max's children from his first marriage — Michael, 35; Joyce, 27; and Marine, 25 — and the couple's three daughters, Chloé, 15; Anaïs, 13; and Agnès, 11.

"Over the years, Shabbat became bigger and bigger," explains the Tunisian-born Max, puffing on one of his many regular cigarettes. "It's not an Orthodox Shabbat, it's much more modern." On a recent Friday night, guests included Mad Men star January Jones and Hilary Duff.

The assorted medley of a crowd befits an eclectic house and its equally eclectic owners. It took a long time for the Azrias to finish this new property because, as on most things, Max and Lubov tend to disagree. "We're complete opposites, Max and I," says Lubov. Still, the Azrias insist they wholly complement each other. "I look at Max and feel like I've been married to him for hundreds of years," explains Lubov. "Everything fits." Their different approaches make for a designing partnership with diverse results. All of their lines for fall have a tough sensibility. BCBG featured jersey minis. The more sophisticated Max Azria label was filled with soft draping, but with a futuristic feel, while the revamped Léger collection continues to be a play on edgy bandage dresses.

Lubov is relaxing and drinking sparkling water in the living room, where the walls are covered with sunburst mirrors, some of the first items the Ukrainian-born former ballerina started collecting. In turn, the house is called La Maison de Soleil, and a crest, with rays emanating from the letter A (for Azria) has been printed on carpets, candles, and the directors' chairs that overlook the outdoor tennis court. Max also has his own face emblazoned on poker chips and cards.

"I'm very visionary, very big picture," says Max. "[My wife] brings details and the perfection." That's not to say he was excited when Lubov asked to decorate the house herself. But when a piece of petrified wood his wife meant for one of their retail stores accidentally ended up in the foyer of the new home, the decorator saw it and threatened to quit, leaving Lubov, with interior designer Aly Daly, to take over.

"He called Max and said, 'Your wife is crazy,'" Lubov remembers. "The whole incident was a monument to my unconscious mind winning this battle." Ultimately, the petrified wood became the centerpiece of the house. "I thought, Wouldn't it be great if there was a chandelier that just broke on top of it and looked like a waterfall?" asks Lubov. Her imagination inspired this reality too.

The home's aesthetic is part Jonathan Adler, part Philippe Starck. A huge orange horse stands in the living room, while giant replicas of an apple and mushrooms lead to the pool. The pool house has its own Turkish hamam, while three peaceful gardens — one Japanese, one English, one French — line the property.

"There's a sense of humor about the place," says Lubov, adding that she was inspired, in part, by Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland: "[Home] should be magical; it should be fairy tale." Indeed, Max agrees. "I think I have the best house in the world," he says. "I thank God to have it. I thank God that I finished it. And I hope that I will live enough to take profit of it."

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